“No boy ought to be kept from school to work"........ stories of child labour in the Great War

Now I am off on a search for the story of John Thomas Longhurst.

On the meadows circa 1880

He was born in 1902 in Weston Underwood in Buckinghamshire, and his father and brother were agricultural labourers and in the July of 1915 he too was working the land.

Now nothing much remarkable perhaps in all that except that John Thomas Longhurst featured along with six others in a report on child labour in agriculture complied by Agricultural Labourers & Rural Workers’ Union.

He was working in Pitsford, Northamptonshire which was in the next county north of his birth place.  It was still common for agricultural labourers as young as Thomas to work away from home.

During the 19th century farmers had undertaken to house and feed young farm labourers of both sexes in return for paying a reduced wage.

Of course it may also be that the Longhurst family had moved into the area.

On the meadows in the 1950s

What is more interesting are the details of his employment and the background to how at just 13 he was working in the fields in Northhamptonshire.

Since the outbreak of the Great War agricultural labour had become scare.

This was in part because many young men had enlisted but also because wage levels remained low.  In 1914 county weekly wage rates varied from twelve shillings in Oxfordshire, fifteen shillings and nine pence in Northampshire and sixteen shillings in Buckinghamshire.

In the northern counties wages were higher.  In Cheshire they were eighteen shillings and in Lancashire twenty-two shillings and three pence.

This disparity had been pretty much the case during the 19th century and reflected that simple fact that farmers in the north had to compete against the pull of the great manufacturing towns and cities.

And the Agricultural Labourers & Rural Workers’ Union pointed out that where there were military camps or alternative industrial employment labourers were tempted to better themselves and leave the land.

All of which had produced serious concerns about agricultural productivity and the practice of employing both women and children.

Virtually everyone was opposed in principle to the use of child labour but it was three creeping in as was the employment of women.

Now the agricultural labour’s union was opposed to both and on the grounds that there was clear evidence that it was driving down wages.

The union cited cases of women being employed on much lower wages  and made it clear that if  women were “to be allowed to engage in labour ordinarily undertaken by men, [it could only be for] the same rates of pay.”* 

Harrowing mustard, 1899

But that said it remained implacably opposed to child labour,

“No boy ought to be kept from school to work.  

The mind gets clogged if a boy is made to work so young and it is impossible like that for the mind to expand as it should.  

We want educated men as farm labourers.”*

And the evidence that came in from union branches where children  were employed was not good.

Young John Thomas was paid four shillings a week for a ten and a half hour day, which included field work, carting manure and scaring birds.

The union was able to detail both pay and hours along with the tasks undertaken each day which helps reveal another side of the the Great War.

There is much more research to do and along the way something more of John Thomas Longhurst’s life will be revealed.

Pictures; from the collections of Alan Brown,  and the Lloyd collection, and Harrowing in Mustard on stubble from A Farmer’s Year, 1899, Haggard, H Rider, 

*Report on Child Labour in Agriculture, Agricultural Labourers & Rural Workers’ Union.
April 1915, courtesy of the Archives & Study Centre,  at the People’s History Museum, Manchester, http://www.phm.org.uk/